What is the most pressing issue for the city? San Francisco mayoral candidate Jeff Adachi addresses the Chronicle editorial board.

Media: San Francisco Chronicle

In his black suit and silk tie, Public Defender Jeff Adachi looked out of place as he stepped into a low-ceilinged, ramshackle live fish store on an alley in the Tenderloin. Learning a candidate for mayor was the unlikely visitor to his shop, 57-year-old Justin Hau, sporting a ponytail and a frown, regaled Adachi with complaints.

The parking meter rates outside his store are so expensive, he's lost customers. The city's Department of Weights and Measures made him pay $120 a year for a scale even though he never needs to weigh anything. And most egregiously of all, Hau said, the city's Animal Control and Welfare Commission this year proposed a ban on the sale of goldfish. The idea was scrapped, but Hau's still worried.

"You guys with the city jobs, everything's included," the Daly City resident said in halting English. "Our jobs, nothing's included. The city is just like a gangster, no different. The government - they push, push, push. What can I do?"

"You're a very powerful advocate," Adachi, 52, told him before they exchanged business cards and the public defender continued on his merchant walk.

Defining issue

Adachi hears complaints like Hau's all the time - that City Hall is unfairly gouging city residents and business owners to pay for its own ballooning budget. And like the trial lawyer that he is, Adachi has submitted the city's skyrocketing pension costs as Exhibit A.

What distinguishes you from the other candidates? San Francisco mayoral candidate Jeff Adachi addresses the Chronicle editorial board.

Media: San Francisco Chronicle

Last year, the traditionally labor-backed, progressive Adachi surprised the lawyers in his office and all of the elected officials at City Hall by waging a one-man war on rising pension costs. Inspired by a Civil Grand Jury report on the matter and convinced that pensions were swallowing city money that should be funding services for the poor, Adachi launched a signature drive to qualify a reform measure for the ballot.

Vigorously fought by labor unions, Proposition B was defeated. But Adachi, described by friends and foes alike as a dog with a bone when he sets his mind on something, went at it again. He reworked the measure, conducted another signature drive and got Proposition D on the Nov. 8 ballot. And when he decided the other 10 serious candidates for mayor weren't talking about pension costs enough, he decided to run for mayor, too.

Adachi said he didn't decide to enter the race until the night before the deadline when he was watching a mayoral debate streaming on the Internet.

"Everybody was talking about how fine and dandy everything was," he said. "I turned to my wife and said, 'No one's talking about the real issues - fixing the structural problems in the city.' She said, 'Well, what are you going to do about it?' "

'Consummate outsider'

His opponents on the pension measure - just about everybody else in the so-called "city family" - say Adachi would be a disastrous mayor because he's alienated the 26,000 employees who work for the city and everybody else elected to lead it. They say it's easy to be the face of a ballot measure, but harder to actually negotiate labor contracts and build consensus to get things done.

But Adachi believes his one-man-band persona would actually help him lead the city - at least for the people who live in it, run its businesses and fund its government.

"I'm a consummate outsider," he said. "I'm not going to make decisions based on what special interests or power brokers say."

Adachi has never been a conformist. While other kids played baseball, he focused on stamp collecting instead. The older of two brothers, Adachi was raised by Gladys, a lab technician, and Sam, a car mechanic in Sacramento.

Adachi studied business at Sacramento City College before transferring to UC Berkeley. He graduated from UC Hastings College of Law in 1985 and was hired by the Public Defender's Office the next year. Adachi soon became known for his intensity in the courtroom and his masochistic work ethic.

He was presumed to be the successor to Public Defender Jeff Brown, but when Brown resigned in 2001, then-Mayor Willie Brown appointed Kimiko Burton-Cruz, the daughter of his good friend, former state Sen. John Burton, as public defender. She promptly fired Adachi, who ran against her the following year and shocked the political establishment by winning. He has been easily elected for two additional terms.

More than surviving

In addition to his roughly $200,000 salary, Adachi earns money through Survival Series, a company he started in the early 1990s that publishes books on how to pass the bar. He lives in a $1.5 million home in the tony St. Francis Wood neighborhood with his wife, Mutsuko Adachi, a stay-at-home mom, and their 11-year-old daughter, who attends a private school.

The controller's office has said Adachi's Prop. D would save $300 million to $400 million more than Mayor Ed Lee's competing Proposition C over the next decade - which Adachi says he would use to reinstate summer school, set up micro-loans for small businesses, expand an internship program for high school students and actually pay for street repairs rather than seeking bond money to do it.

Those kinds of issues, he says, are what real San Franciscans care about.